Playing The Full Minor Pentatonic Scale: Part I

Easily one of the most popular (and therefore, most important!) things to learn on the guitar is the pentatonic scale. Mastering it is essential for playing many types of music, such as rock and blues. Also, once you have mastered the pentatonic scale, it becomes that much easier to learn new scales, such as the diatonic scale.

Now, if you haven’t already read the intro post about the pentatonic scale, I suggest you do so. After that, feel free to read this post. In the other post, we used the A minor pentatonic scale, but for this post, we’ll work with the E minor. (Why? Because it’s important to learn to transpose the scales to different keys from the outset, and it’s also relatively easy to play the E minor, since the home position is on the open strings and on the 12th fret.) So let’s get started:

Low E string: Open, 3rd fret

A string: Open, 2nd fret

D string: Open, 2nd fret

G string: Open, 2nd fret

B string: Open, 3rd fret

High E: Open, 3rd fret

Play this pattern. Now move it up and play the same pattern an octave higher, starting on the twelfth fret instead of the open E string. Notice anything? It’s the exact same pattern as the A minor pentatonic scale! Imagine that! As a matter of fact, this pattern can be applied to any key, as long as that first note you play (in this case, open or 12th fret on the E string) is the note in which key you are playing. So, for the E minor pentatonic, we can start on either the open E string or the 12th fret, one octave higher. Also, with the A minor pentatonic, we start with the fifth fret, or the “A” note. (Hint: If you haven’t learned where the different notes are yet, read the post.)

Okay, so we have the same position as last time. What about the other ones? Actually, once you learn where the notes are, it just becomes a matter of time before you can find the other notes. That’s because the pentatonic scale is only composed of 5 different notes spanning different octaves. So for that E minor scale we played, those notes were E, G, A, B, D. Go on, try it out. You will find all five of those notes within the scale. Now, if you go around the rest of the fretboard and find all five of those notes up and down the frets, you will find the other five positions of the pentatonic scale. After you do that, you can transpose any of those positions to play the minor pentatonic in any key!

In part 2, we’ll do that. Otherwise, you can be bold (which is what I recommend) and try to find them all on your own.